This invention relates to a submarine electric power feeding branching device and a submarine electric power feeding system using the submarine electric power feeding branching device. In particular, this invention relates to a submarine power feeding branching device suitable for arranging submarine cables in mesh pattern and constructing a submarine power feeding system having the submarine cables arranged in mesh pattern.
In fields of researches for submarine earthquakes, ocean environment or the like, there are demands for arranging a large number of submarine observation devices, such as seismometers, tsunami instruments, current meters, hydrometers or the like, in two dimensional arrangement (or a matrix) on the bottom of the sea to collect various data from the submarine observation devices.
To meet such demands, it is possible to construct a observation system that comprises submarine observation devices, which are provided on the bottom of the sea, and submarine cables, which are used for feeding electric power to the submarine observation devices and continuously collecting data from (or communicating with) the submarine observation devices.
However, it is impractical that the submarine cables individually connect the submarine observation devices to a land observation device(s). Furthermore, when an observation system has plural submarine observation devices which are connected to a submarine cable in series, it possesses low reliability. This is because the submarine observation devices located between a failure point and the end of the submarine cable can not receive electric power from a land observation device and communicate with the land observation device when the failure occurs in the submarine cable. Thus, a submarine cable system (or power feeding system) having submarine cables arranged in mesh or lattice pattern is necessary to construct an observation system having a large number of submarine observation devices arranged in two dimensional arrangement (or a matrix) and possessing high reliability.